A pot pourri

The Season of Brideshead
Et in Arcadia Ego, Chapter 5

I want to move along fairly quickly, so here is a pot pourri of stuff from Chapter 5.

Jasper's vindication
There are four vindications of Jasper's advice. All four can simply be drawn from the text:

1. The experience with his father convinces Charles never to live beyond his means again.
2. The flamboyant dress of the art instructor convinces Charles to dress as Jasper advised.
3. Charles and Sebastian shake off many of their first year friends just as Jasper had said.
4. Sebastian is in trouble precisely because, as Jasper said, he has gotten himself noticed.

I think the more poignant, and profound thing, is when we see what is lacking in Sebastian. He says, "How does one mend one's ways?" and lists a bunch of things he has seen others doing  but it is clear he has no idea how. He lacks the central thing that Jasper advised which is a project, a purpose, for one's time at university. He is helpless with no sense of direction or purpose in his life.

And that, in a large part is because his mother has chosen to try and manipulate her children into doing what she wants rather than trying to raise them to be independent adults. None of her children, not even my beloved Cordelia, ever moves completely beyond childhood. (Waugh later described the time he spent with the Lygon family at their ancestral pile as a world free of adults. That is another reason for the continued relevance of the book, it speaks to us who also grew up in a  world almost free of real adults.)

Yesterday, I talked about the hints that Mr. Samgrass may be trying to manipulate Sebastian into his bed. The other thing to note is how well He and Lady Marchmain get along. On the surface, anyway, her motives, to get her son out of trouble, may seem less malignant than what Mr. Samgrass wants but it ought to trouble us a whole lot that they work so well together. Mr. Samgrass is in on the secret right from the beginning.

The final nail in her coffin as far as I'm concerned in her telling Charles what is certainly a lie: that it was Msgr. Bell's idea that Sebastian come live with him and not hers. Both Sebastian and Mr. Samgrass talk of this as if it had been very much in the works for a while. And then Charles and Bridey pack up Sebastian's things and Bridey lets slip that he spent his final year at Msgr. Bell's. Charles is too chivalrous to betray such and emotion even if he felt it but the emotion he and we should be feeling towards her is not a kind one.

Like everyone, she could be forgiven but there is a lot to forgive.

Elaborate pastiches
We saw last chapter that Sebastian wanted Charles to progress in the direction of doing an elaborate pastiche. In this chapter he gets his way but, telling the story years later, Charles casually dismisses the result of this work.

 My drawings were worthless; in my own rooms I designed elaborate little pastiches, some of which, preserved by friends of the period, come to light occasionally to embarrass me.

Sebastian who could change Charles' whole world view by making a remark while casually flipping through Clive Bell, now directs Charles in ways that are useless to him. He is diminishing. Who will replace him?

Anthony leaves and Rex appears
We get an elegiac bit of writing about Anthony now gone. Again, the purple prose here is meant to reflect Charles' memory not the way Waugh would express it. The admission of Anthony's importance now is an important one.

The Charity matinée was over, I felt; the impresario had buttoned his astrakhan coat and taken his fee and the disconsolate ladies of the company were without a leader.

And it goes on some length after that. But the detail that I want to focus on here is the astrakhan coat. for the boys, without a leader, will shortly get themselves in big trouble after an outing to a brothel and they will call Rex Mottram to bail them out—there is a new impresario in town. And note the fascinating detail that recurs:

Rex stood in the charge-room looking the embodiment—indeed the burlesque—of power and prosperity; he wore a fur-lined overcoat with broad astrakhan lapels and a silk hat.

Anthony was never an entirely benign figure and neither will Rex be but from Charles needs a figure to respond to to grow and from here on in the principle figure will be Rex Mottram. As I said a while ago, very few of the names in this book are accidental. Rex means king, of course and we would do very well to pay close attention to him because he is an immensely important figure in Charles' life, much more important than Charles would like to admit.

And Charles is intimidated by Rex and we should not let his subjective reactions blind us to the truth about Rex. Or, perhaps a better way of putting it, we should pay close attention to what Charles' inadvertently lets out by what he remembers. This little two line exchange between Brenda Champion and Rex, for example:

'Why a Jeroboam Rex?' she said peevishly. 'You always want to have everything too big."

'Won't be too big for us,' he said, taking the bottle in his own hands and easing the cork.

A while ago, long before I started blogging Brideshead, we had a lively discussion in the comments here about shaving which led to a discussion of the symbolic role it plays in the book. To have your beard removed by another man is an act of shameful submission. Rex has the boys shaved.

By the way, the biggest clue that something is amiss in Charles account of Rex is his appalling lack of gratitude towards the man to whom he owes gratitude.

Death's head
The two women that Charles and Sebastian meet are, of course, symbols for one another. Sebastian has been associated with death ever since the beginning of the book and, we should remember, a skull is one of the attributes that St. Aloysius Gonzaga is pictured with. It is no surprise at all then to read Charles saying,

The Death's Head seemed destined for me.

What is perhaps more important to note is that, while the skull symbolizes Sebastian, the sickly child symbolizes Charles and this is the first hint we have had that there is something in Charles that needs fixing. It's no accident that this comes to light at precisely the moment that a rival in manhood also appears.

By way,  a final bit of naughtiness, this time very much on Waugh's part. The brothel that Charles and Sebastian is very much based on a real one that was called "the 43" because it was located at 43 Gerrard Street. Because you can't exactly hang a sign out in front of such an institution, it is was named after its street address. Waugh fictionalizes the club by placing it at 100 Sink Street (an address that does not exist). But he doesn't call it "the 100 club", or even "The Century" but the "Old Hundredth" and that is very naughty on his part.

For those not familiar with Christian hymnbooks, the Old Hundredth is the name for one of the most famous hymns. It's called that because it is one of the oldest melodies used to set the 100 Psalm.

So why did Waugh name his brothel after a psalm? Perhaps just as a sly dig. I think, however, that if you follow along with the words of the psalm in the video below, something else that he is up to may occur to you.







The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.